Why Legislation Reining In NSA Spying May Actually Make It …

It appears that concern about government snooping may actually be an issue of equal importance to Democrats and Republicans, at least while a Democrat is in the White House.

Mr. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has been leading the negotiations, and several officials familiar with the deliberations said a deal had been reached. Because the Senate leaves for its August recess at the end of next week, it is unlikely to vote on the bill before September.

The Center for Democracy and Technology supports the draft language weve seen, said Harley Geiger, a senior counsel for the advocacy group. It is, in every instance, a step forward and an improvement on what the House enacted.

The bill also modifies several changes the House version made to the procedures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which hears only the governments point of view without any opposing counsel to argue the other side or to file appeals if the government wins, and issues classified opinions interpreting surveillance laws.

The House bill says the government must make public unclassified summaries of significant rulings by the court. Mr. Leahys draft adds that those summaries must have enough information for people to understand the rulings impact on civil liberties.

Will this legislation would stop illegal NSA surveillance? Of course not. Here's one big problem, for starters:

Several senators, including Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both Democrats, have called for requiring the courts permission to search for a specific Americans communications, and last month the House separately approved an amendment to a spending bill that would bar the use of funds for such searches. But the Obama administration opposes that change, and Mr. Leahys draft does not include it.

So should we care about this legislation? Of course. While such laws will not eliminate the spying, they will serve to inhibit the actions of the NSA to some degree. They also lessen the likelihood that the NSA or any government agency or Administration would be willing to use information on American citizens for purposes of improper influence, blackmail or coercion. The more publicly known, "legal" limitations of record to the NSA's behavior, however ineffective in practice, the less likely that this agency will risk negative public exposure of the kind Edward Snowden supplied, because there will at least be a law on the books for Courts to rely on. This alone will serve as something of an inhibition, and may possibly prompt the NSA to re-think some of its more arbitrary and violative schemes before they're actually hatched. The NSA have shown they hate public exposure more than anything else. So long as they have to at least pretend to hew to any law, they will always be forced into maintaining a public pretense of obeying it. The real scandal of the NSA was not the spying itself--it was the fact that we were never supposed to know what they were doing. We were all supposed to blithely go along with our lives, happily chatting on our Facebook accounts, texting, websurfing, emailing, cheerfully clueless to the surveillance cage being built around us. And most Americans would be oblivious right now, if it wasn't for Snowden's actions. But everyone knows about it now, the cat's out of the bag, and the eyes of the world are watching.

The House bill was "watered down" on the instigation of Administration officials and originally contained some fairly harsh provisions aimed at the NSA's domestic spying. So if Leahy has achieved a deal on this improved Senate version, then there is no logical reason for the legislation to be unacceptable to the Republicans when the Bill, if it passes, gets kicked back to the House.

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Why Legislation Reining In NSA Spying May Actually Make It ...